A Muscular Messiah needed
to bring peace to the Middle East

Although the Palestinians had a new Prime Minister, and now another one, there is a vacuum of leadership in the Middle East. And that vacuum means that there is no one that can bring peace. Resultantly, the Middle East will remain a shooting range and a killing field, and the White House has no power or ideas that can quell the violence.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who did everything he could to become Prime Minister, thinking Israel's military might, if used aggressively and brutally enough could stop the violence and subdue the Palestinians, has been unable to bring peace. He was confused about the limits to military power, as were the Israeli people who elected him.

After having been in office and seen that military might cannot stop the Palestinians, Sharon has seen and said that this Israeli "Occupation of the Palestinians cannot continue." Here is a man who came into office willing to crush the Palestinians until military victory was achieved, but he has realized that such a victory is impossible. How does one gain victory over a people who use their bodies as weapons and are eagerly willing to die? That is the issue he is confronting.

Faced with that issue, the Israeli government last week decided that Yassar Arafat is the main problem, and he must be expelled from Palestine. That would be the blunder of blunders. That act would be equivalent of George Bush's demand that Saddam Hussein leave Iraq within 48-hours. A foolish and reckless act Bush has not recognized yet and an act that has US troops locked in an Iraqi guerilla war in which they die daily.

Peace, a state of being that was to be minted by Sharon through the barrel of a gun, is nowhere to be found. The US Roadmap to Peace is a failure, as other such road maps have failed, and the Israeli-Palestine mayhem remains the constant. The Roadmap to Peace has gone to the dung-heap, yet Sharon has been made to recognize that military power is limited, even though he rode into office on the promise that he would use military power brutally to bring an end to the violence.

Israel is back to square one, a place they have been many times. So the road taken this time is that the problem is Arafat being in country, and he needs to be moved out of Palestine. This solution is an act of desperation issuing from a people who have no solutions to the peace puzzle. Of course, that act would further inflame the land and destroy many more lives. Yes, the situation can be further inflamed.

Awesome military powers often think their military might can change landscapes and languages, customs and cultures, and always dictate the dialectics. That is where Israel finds itself, and they assume that the lowly Palestinian people, with nothing but their bodies and explosives, can be herded here and there at the will of their military power. That is a calculus that needs reconsidering.

Sharon is hopeless; the Bush Administration is hopeless; and the flames of hatred and confusion burn with endless fuel. The best minds of this nation and of Israel have focused on this issue and found no solution to it. President Clinton personally invested enormous time and effort trying to bring an end to the confusion that is the Middle East and failed. The Bush Administration backs Israel on most of their demands on the Palestinians, demanding a Prime Minister; that too has been done, but it has failed to make a difference.

The Jewish ideology looks for a messiah who will come and deliver them. The Christian ideology, however, holds that Jesus was that Messiah. But the Jews wanted a muscular Messiah, and the Christians argue that muscles were not needed at first, but meekness. However, Jesus promised to return as the Messiah, not in his meek form, but his return will be in his muscular form. And if Israel ever needed a muscular Messiah to handle this situation, it is now; for as the situation stands, they are on the road to perdition and there seems to be no turning back.

Although leaders of the US and Israel are not really men of peace who can honestly talk peace, in spite of how they are touted as men of honesty and respect, whenever there are viable alternatives to war issuing from anyone, those alternatives should be pursued over a use of military force that will kill and destroy, and bring no solutions.

Ariel Sharon thought to come into power and dictate the Palestinian facts on the ground by sheer force--he was wrong. George Bush thought he could present his roadmap to peace and the Middle East would accept it and peace would result; he was wrong. The Middle East problem seems almost intractable and only a muscular Messiah will be able to bring peace to this lawless land. But waiting for a messiah to come does not mean doing nothing; we must work toward peace until that Muscular Messiah comes to deliver us all from the lawlessness of that land and the lawlessness inside each one of us that vents to the outside of us and makes a Middle East and other places caldrons of confusion.

Like America, Israel desperately needs new leadership that can talk and negotiate an honest and just peace. Marauding cowboys are not peacemakers. Both Sharon and Bush have used brutish military power, and that is not a solution to the problems faced in the world. Israel needs leadership that has healing and peace as the central philosophical posture toward its neighbors. The Palestinians need to broker a bitter peace of compromise that is not all it wants but something it can live with.